Case Study:

Backing up servers to the cloud and bringing down costs

“For server backup, we’ve been really pushing towards the cloud lately. It’s one of our top initiatives. We want to save money, simplify complexities, and make sure everything is always up and running.”

Steve Nass

IT Supervisor, TechFlow

TechFlow’s technology solutions were making the shift to the cloud — their email, knowledge base, SharePoint, and financial time card systems were already there.

About TechFlow

TechFlow is an IT services company helping organizations capitalize on enterprise technology investments by managing, creating and improving eBusiness solutions while offering comprehensive systems and infrastructure operations and management services.

The downfalls of the traditional backup methods

“It’s a very error prone process. There was a time we were waiting on a box of tapes and when the technician finally delivered it to us, the box was empty. It definitely wasn’t the most efficient way to access our backed up data.”

Jose Ortiz

Lead Systems Administrator

Traditional backup hasn’t changed much since its early days: back up everything locally, send to tape, and send it off-site for storage. This resulted in heavy hardware and maintenance costs, as well as increased chances of human error. In traditional scenarios, it could take hours or days just to restore the backup, not to mention a lot of manual labor and time. They were seeking to lower the amount of hardware on premise and simplify the overall process.

TechFlow’s other technology solutions were making the shift to the cloud — their email, knowledge base, SharePoint, and financial time card systems were already there. It was time to look into a sophisticated and reliable cloud solution for their backups.

Establishing the foundation for reliable cloud backup

“We looked at several cloud backup vendors but the best solution for TechFlow was [Druva’s] Phoenix since it was simple, offered unlimited backups, and brought the most value to our company.”

Jose Ortiz

Lead Systems Administrator

One of their main goals was to modernize their backup processes. By moving to the cloud, they shortened the whole backup process (from server to tape to storage) and reduced labor time to restore that data.

As an early design partner for Phoenix, Druva’s remote server backup solution, TechFlow went through the setup process even without all the documentation in place. But even so they found it very easy to learn on their own and simple to use. They could add a new server to Druva with just a few clicks. “I would feel confident if we needed to back up another 20 servers it could be done in half an hour!” – Jose Ortiz.

Benefits of a cloud backup solution

“I like having Amazon’s AWS in the back end because I can depend on our data being safe. There’s no worry about a small company, or a new company, backing up our data on their servers suddenly go out of business and have our data go with them.”

Jose Ortiz

Lead Systems Administrator

Now that their backup was also in the cloud, they experienced faster recovery times and took advantage of Druva’s unlimited backup archiving and AWS infrastructure.

Additionally, they removed manual processes from the backup and incidents where technicians had to deliver or wait for delivery of tapes were a thing of the past. No longer did they have to go to the server room and cycle through all the tapes on a tape drive.

“I can see us expanding over more servers over time. I like that Phoenix has provided a solution that is easy to use.” – Jose Oritz.